ed in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity to
recognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evil
is always relative and subordinate to some constituted nature in itself
a standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation of
eventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordingly
accidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actions
to natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground for
the condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give rise
to it by their imperfect realisation.

The Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophical
interpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect to
what was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good;
in their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created by
God. For God was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods were
subordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out of
morals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in the
inverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that the
highest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure as
a first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operation
is what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine
which would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral
ideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight.
If the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pass to an ordinary pantheism,
while if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in a
naturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is a
function of things and neither their substance nor their cause.

[Sidenote: The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.]

To accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, was
not very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be set
down to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters of
fact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and when
the creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility became
merely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortal
philosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation was
wholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: the
disparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity